In the background, your IT team guarantees the stable operation of your complex PLM infrastructure and makes sure that new and old cloud-based and on-premises applications work in concert. But your in-house staff resources are limited, and in cost terms it’s almost impossible to assemble the right mix of IT skills in all the places where you need them. For this reason, strategic tasks are often neglected due to staff constraints: Usually, IT teams have to devote up to 90 percent of their working hours to system development and operation.
Application Management stabilizes your PLM and frees up IT resources
Many businesses therefore rely on application management to obtain external support on such tasks. Application management ensures maximum availability of your PLM systems and helps you tackle the foremost challenges related to your PLM IT:
- Keeping the total cost of ownership (TCO) under control: Businesses have to balance the costs of IT operation, maintenance and upgrading against the benefits they gain from digital end-to-end processes.
- Improving resource allocation: To maximize productivity and increase the amount of time spent on strategic, value-adding tasks, you need to free up resources within your technical divisions and IT unit.
- Evolving your PLM: Your PLM landscape and your applications must keep evolving in tandem with your business strategy. That’s the only way to keep your business adaptive, competitive and ready to ready to capitalize on new revenue opportunities as they arise.
AMS lets you operate your PLM system in accordance with your specific business requirements, and it assists your management and your stakeholders in guiding its evolution. To let you react flexibly to changing business realities, application management also ensures that your PLM IT infrastructure has the necessary level of scalability.
From a technical point of view, AMS can include the following aspects:
- Proactive system monitoring
- Continual maintenance and infrastructure optimization
- Service Desk for technical and IT units
- Updates, adaptations, expansions and process optimization
- IT change management for business continuity
All these services are aimed at keeping your applications running at peak performance. Additionally, they minimize system downtime and provide comprehensive safeguards to protect your systems and intellectual property from threats. Moreover, they make it easy for you to adhere to legal compliance requirements.
Who can benefit from collaboration with an AMS partner?
Outsourcing application management benefits major corporations and mid-size businesses equally. For example, supplier companies need to keep step with their OEM customers. AMS lets them meet complex market requirements while keeping costs under control, because efficient management and preventive measures reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their PLM systems. AMS thus lowers operating costs while maximizing the benefits of IT investments.
Once you have selected a specific AMS provider, your collaboration will be guided by framework agreements and service level agreements (SLAs) which define important aspects of governance, security and transparency. Best practices should be based on the ITIL framework, which defines processes for efficient, maximum-quality IT services.
How Application Management helps your business succeed
Secure in the knowledge that your PLM is operating smoothly and reliably, your IT staff can now focus more closely on their core tasks and increase their productivity. And if a system hiccup does occur, the standardized AMS response ensures that you are back up and running in no time.
A high-performance PLM system improves and accelerates your product development processes, letting you bring your products to market maturity more quickly. Because your systems and units are always up to date, you can also switch to the fast lane in terms of innovation and reactivity to market developments.
Because your PLM system remains scalable and flexible, it also provides valuable support for business and IT transformation. For you, that means that your IT investments will pay off. With AMS giving you access to experts and knowledge whenever you need it, you can keep your PLM system running at peak performance and consistently enhance its quality.
Your next steps: Introducing Application Management
Application Management begins with people: As in all change projects, it’s important to get all the stakeholders on board. The IT unit will usually take the lead, but the project will only gain business relevance if management and the technical units also assume an active role.
A shared perspective is a decisive prerequisite of project success, and moderation skills and clear communication are needed to ensure that everyone speaks the same language. It’s also important to avoid focusing solely on technical KPIs: You also need to ensure that the SLA defines clear goals oriented on business results.
In this way, you lay the groundwork for your strategic planning, improve your resource allocation and maximize the benefits you gain from your PLM system. Your AMS partner is there to help you achieve these goals.
Discover how MANN+HUMMEL and Webasto benefit from Application Management by CENIT.
